Pitchfork

On their first LP in over five years, power-poppers Imperial Teen vie with Sonic Youth for the title of "most ironic band name." Barreling toward middle age, they've managed to keep the teenaged enthusiasm that defines their music intact. But it hasn't been easy for them. The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band is a meta-album that downplays the pansexual exuberance with which Imperial Teen are most closely associated. Instead, it focuses on growing old with grace, and the difficulties of continuing to rock out against the depredations of age.

Despite the fact that only two of Imperial Teen's four albums came out in the 1990s-- the mid-to-late 1990s, at that-- they epitomize the sound and style of that decade's alterna-rock boom. Roddy Bottum is a 90s double-threat, having been the keyboardist for Faith No More before starting Imperial Teen. IT's hit single "Yoo-Hoo" was a staple on MTV's 120 Minutes, that pacesetter of all things alternative, just before the program slipped into the backwaters of MTV2 as alternative's cultural relevance waned.

The indelible panting that rhythmically undergirded "Yoo-Hoo" is scattered about the new album, including the song "Shim Sham" (and wasn't "Shim Sham" one of the fake U.S. states that Bob Odenkirk attempted to name in seven seconds on another 90s staple, HBO's "Mr. Show"?), which also name-checks the Rock*A*Teens. Imperial Teen have always had this bald-faced eagerness, which makes their music appealing while threatening to push it toward the silliness that occasionally plagues this comeback album. Regardless, The Hair the TV is a musical time capsule; Imperial Teen have done little to change their B-52s-redolent formula. It brims with delirious male/female harmonies, turbocharged garage-pop guitars and jangly indie-pop ones, rollicking rhythms, boisterous count-offs, bratty exclamations, and saccharine melodies.

If the album's sound roots it in a bygone time, its lyrical themes date it firmly in the present. But it's a present that exists conditionally, always battling against the black hole suction of the past, as befits a fortysomething band obsessed with youth. Hair finds Imperial Teen in full-bore navel gazing mode, talking both obliquely and directly about where they are and, more importantly, how they got there. On the latter score, they seem mostly mystified, not bitter-- Imperial Teen don't go for self-pity.

The album's title is a précis of how the band members have spent the time between 2002's On and now. Roddy Bottum's been composing music for film and television; Jone Stebbins ran a hairstyling business; Lynn Truell (formerly Perko) has been popping out kids; Will Schwartz worked on his own band, Hey Willpower. The song "Baby and the Band" is one of the handful of unpleasantly precious tracks, but it's crucial to the album's theme. "Wake on the shores of a distant land," goes a the most telling refrain, "the hair, the TV, the baby and the band." This land is adulthood, and Imperial Teen seem astonished to find themselves there.

Such ruminations flare up throughout the album. "Do It Better" is a sweet indie pop swooner leavened by a crunchy rock chorus, and one of the more overtly elegiac songs on the album-- "Got a watch that's made of gold/ But I think it's getting old"-- along with the whizzing, sultry fuzz-stomper "Shim Sham", a heyday revival with a distorto-oh-oh chorus: "Now and then seems like a different scene." And "Room with a View" lays it all on the line: "We're working so hard/ And we're betting the farm/ Charge it all to the card..." Bottum and co. are trying hard to "pretend we'll be twenty for life," and this is a point where other bands might turn depressive. But Imperial Teen aren't cowed by the determinism of age: According to "One Two", a harmony-laden fuzz buzz that repeatedly crash lands and lifts off again, at least one band member "hasn't finished sleeping around."

The Hair the TV the Baby and the Band sometimes steps out of this introspective mode. "It's Now" is a winner, bouncing back and forth between a shuffle and a crunch, with great slice-of-life lyrics in Belle and Sebastian's fey style: "You've got mirrors on the ceiling/ You're serving Darjeeling/ And your art nouveau seems so logical to me." Opening track "Everything" is less charming; its cascading guitars and hammy lyrical conceit ("Everything _____," from "judicious" to "hypocrisy," over and over) make it overbearing. But maybe that's beside the point-- after all, being who you are, silly or otherwise, is the privilege of adulthood. If the album's self-indulgent moments aren't satisfying, at least they feel hard-earned.